links

A good history and overview of the tagging phenomenon.

What steps do organisations and individuals take when faced with the prospect of buying a VSAT- a parabolic dish and associated electronic equipment used to send and receive information via a satellite? How do they select VSAT equipment and service options and arrive at the final choice? What factors should be considered in buying VSAT equipment and services and what should be avoided? What should one do after installation and when the VSAT system is not performing as anticipated?

A relatively small but interesting list of relief wikis from NetSquared.

A quick and easy introduction to blogging tools. It's the first in a series that includes Starting Blogging and an upcoming guide to writing good blog posts.

Sponsored by the Spirit of America foundation, BlogSafer.org contains guides on how bloggers can avoid state persecution around the world.  Focusing on areas where persecution of bloggers has been the worst, the guides are available for Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, China and Zimbabwe.

In recognition of the fact that conditions, technologies and safest practices will inevitably change the guides are posted on a wiki.  A wiki is a web site that any authorized user (in this case anyone) can change the contents of, where all previous versions are easily viewable and subscribers can be notified any time a page in the site has changed. Successful wikis are ones where a group of committed users keep the information current and pay attention to notifications of changes having been made in order to make sure that those changes are good for the wiki.  

If you plan to launch and/or manage an online community, you should join the Life Onliine conference in this huge online community, founded and presided (and loosely hosted) by Howard Rheingold, the big daddy of all things pertaining to online community.

The birthplace of tagging, this popular service for saving and sharing bookmarks is now owned by Yahoo! The interface is pretty bare-bones but there are tons and tons of del.icio.us add-on tools.

del.icio.us ICT for development tag

A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.

Our global team of regional blogger-editors is working to find, aggregate and track these conversations. Each day they link to 5-10 of the most interesting blog posts from their regions in the “daily roundups” section. A larger group of contributing bloggers is posting daily features in in the left-hand Weblog section, shedding light on what blogging communities in their countries have been talking about recently.

"Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs. "

Comprehensive and concise overview of nonprofit blogging.  I don't agree with the idea that you must allow for comments on a blog or else you are "suspect."  While commenting and the discussion that ensues help build relationships, many respected bloggers disable comments because of spam.  Nancy Schwartz has many other good resources on her site and blog, Getting Attention.

This book was created by a team of individuals who each, in their own field, are actively participating in the ever-expanding Internet by pushing its reach farther than ever before. The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost.

Inside, you will learn how to:

Hosting online events can be a great way to get new people involved in your community, remind past users why they should come back, and encourage those already participating often.  This article illustrates how to plan and produce an online event and grow your membership.

Marshall Kirkpatrick weighs in on hosted vs. host-your-own blogging software.

This year’s iCommons Summit aims to bring together, in a creative, stimulating and cooperative environment, the pioneers from these communities – to inspire and learn from one another and establish closer working relationships around a set of incubator projects. This year’s landmark event is structured around three major themes:

1. Tools. Developing effective, relevant tools to assist other creators, authors, scientists and researchers to develop and showcase their creativity and innovation.

2. Policy. Strategies to ensure international, regional and local policy fora that are conducive to the development and nurturing of the commons.

Blog + Wiki on ICT for development issues, elearning, all from a global context

Emma Tonkin considers wikis in the context of emerging technologies and while explaining the benefits they may offer, provides a timely warning on the feasibility of their deployment.

A good collection of links on how to pitch your story, product, or blog to bloggers. 

Online Community Guru, Nancy White has compiled a comprehensive toolkit for online community facilitators.  She has everything from online event management to online courses on facilitation.

This article gives a good overview of online community dynamics.

A guide to some of the legal issues involved in podcasting, particularly copyright and publicity rights.

A way to find other podcasters and people with an interest in podcasting, the process of creating audio or video content and "feeding" it to iPods or iPod-like devices via XML feeds.

 A total run-down on how to set up a blog for your nonprofit, from TechSoup.

SANGONeT was founded in 1987, and over the past 18 years has developed into a dynamic civil society organisation with a history closely linked to the social and political changes experienced by South Africa during its transition to democracy. SANGONeT is still one of very few NGOs in Africa involved in the field of information communication technologies (ICTs) and continues to serve civil society with a wide range of ICT products and services.

How can you and your organization get the most out of Social Networking tools? What valuable Social Networking techniques can you import into your own website? These questions (and many others) will be discussed by the experts at "Social networking systems - chat rooms on steroids or a real tool for social change?" --  one of many interesting afternoon sessions at the upcoming NetSquared conference.

This is APDIP's feature event at the second World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis November 2005. The video shows the panel discussion led by key figures in ICT4D and FOSS, including, Robert Kramer of ComTIA, Louis-Dominique Ouedraogo of UN Joint Inspection Unit, Bruce Perens of Sourcelabs, Inc., Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu Foundation, Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation and Shane Wall of Intel Corporation. Kenneth Cukier of The Economist moderated the event.

Tracking and organizing blog posts with tags.

A well-attended and extremely interesting online conversation about Social Networking for nonprofits.

Interesting Wired Article, commented here by David Warlick (long time educator/blogger).  I like how it frames the conversation by putting the dollar costs and at the percent of daily purchasing power per capita for accessing public internet cafe's around the world.

The NEW MEDIA COLLECTIVE is an information resource and social network for and about people of color in the digital media making community.

NMC's goal is to build a community of individuals and organizations working together to teach and promote media education and literacy to the most underserved and misrepresented segments of society, while breaking down barriers to entry to the most underrepresented in both traditional and new media.

Utilizing online outlets like videoblogging, podcasting, blogging, and photoblogging, we can represent ourselves honestly, accurately, and independently to the world at large without the distortions and half-truths of mainstream media.

Although this is a very old topic (circa 2001), it demonstrates the TechSoup forums while discussing the topic of this very resource center, so I thought I would include it.

Urban Sound Project™ is a Network of Independent Podcast and Videocast by African-Americans & Other Persons of Color. The idea is to have a place, where People of Color from around the globe can announce & share their Podcast and/or Videocast with the rest of the World.

Urban Sound Project™ encourages all people, no matter what Ethnic, Social, Political or Regional background; to start their own Podcast and/or Videocast and to share their Views, News, Information,

This article illustrates the larger issues of how to build and sustain a successful online community.

Check out Eddie's fantastic video interview with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki.

A great discussion from techsoup on various reasons to use (or not to use) wikis.

A very nice article from ZDNet explaining the strengths and use cases for wikis, with an eye toward many successful nonprofit projects.

A very useful techsoup forum thread about wikis, including a definition, some links, and some great discussion about their strategic use in nonprofit organizations.

Share links to newly discovered podcasts, your experiences with podcasting software and hardware, or ask questions about what you need to put together a podcast of your own.